Almagest

The library · The Western houses

The third house

what the third house governs in the Western chart

What the tradition reads

The third house, in the tradition's own terms, is the house of brothers and sisters, of neighbours and kin nearby, and of the short journeys and everyday speech that connect a person to their immediate world. Ptolemy's own chapter on brothers and sisters does not read this house at all: he assigns the place for siblings to the sign occupying the Midheaven, or by day to whichever sign holds Venus and by night to whichever holds the Moon, since he counts brothers and sisters as an extension of the same place used for the mother. Lilly's later English tradition is what actually fixes brethren, sisters and kindred to the third house, and adds short journeys as its second business, the logic being that both categories, family close at hand and travel close at hand, belong to the same near horizon of a life, distinct from the far travel and higher learning the tradition gives to the ninth house opposite it. Alan Leo, who heads his own chapter on the house brethren and relatives, short journeys, the mind, says that in the third house we study all that relates to movement, transition and change, and that it rules all affairs that seriously affect the mind. His summary of the twelve gives it relatives and kindred, travelling, the intellect derived from education and study, and the minor impressions made upon the physical brain, with the neck, arms and shoulders and the lungs, and he counts it among the cadent houses.

The story

The third house sits two places on from the Ascendant, the first of the cadent houses, falling away from the angular strength of the first, fourth, seventh and tenth. Alan Leo, who groups the third, sixth, ninth and twelfth together under that name, reads them as governing the mind and thought more than emotion or action, and as carrying matters latent in the mind and not yet ready for final expression in the physical world. Ptolemy's own place for brothers and sisters was never this house: his chapter ties the reading to the sign on the Midheaven, or by day to Venus's sign and by night the Moon's, the same place his tradition used for the mother, siblings being read as an extension of the family judged from there. It was the later English tradition, represented by Lilly's Christian Astrology, that moved the topic onto the third house itself, printed in 1647 for a horary practice that kept both categories under one roof: family close at hand and travel close at hand, both belonging to the same near horizon of a life, distinct from the far travel and higher learning the tradition gives to the ninth house opposite it.

Written from

Corpus key house:3.